Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  Kalypso found herself motionless, unable to think or act as the boat drifted gently after the slowly sinking unit. They were over the heart of RV-11, a volcanic vein which even Kalypso knew had been identified as a treasure trove of hyperthermophilic life: a whole subsystem of organized, colonial prokaryotes and their dependent algaics moving among half-constructed natural columns of gelatinous luma at ambient temperature in excess of 200°C. They fluoresced and exchanged metabolic processes in an explosion of color that was a joy to the eye — or would be, in different circumstances.

  Right now her suit was reading 70°C: hot enough. The shaft below wasn’t a mere hole: it displayed structure. The surface here was viscous; probably full of developing luma, for the density of the fluid was inconsistent, sometimes giving, sometimes resisting—sometimes sticking like a spiderweb. Colonies swarmed with the current and attached to the hull; others were repelled and curved away. She could see the colors of distinct strains flow with the current the boat created. Collection fils continued to arrive at the boat’s hull like guests to a party.

  95°C.

  A safety line, once bright orange but now phosphorescent blue with colonials, ran down the side of the well. Handholds had been driven into the basalt, which was otherwise as smooth as a throat.

  She saw the probe.

  Kalypso’s clipboard of mental habits did not have a checkmark next to vertigo: growing up in First she had literally never experienced it, not even a little. So when she gazed down into that shaft, observed the effect of its spin, she thought she must be suffering from some kind of poisoning. For her whole body suddenly wanted to scream and run and fall down and die all at once. The thermal activity caused by the eruption further down the Rift was at this very moment surging up the luma of this well, and the effects were made all too clear as the downed probe melted before her eyes. It swirled into the well as cream added to soup, its Earthmade parts flying away from the central axis like dancers seen from a height. The heat was coming. She put frantic hands on the console, but the boat wouldn’t obey her. Temperature gauges screamed. Probably she wouldn’t even think fast enough. Not even enough time to think, goodbye.

  He knocked her down again, this time in an absentminded way as he pushed her aside in the course of pulling in his collection filaments. The radio blared static and half-intelligible words.

  I can’t believe this, she thought, tumbling to the back of the cockpit. I’m really going to die, any second now: what should I think? What should I do? Where’s my epiphany? Where’s my final moment? Nothing.

  Nothing. Just the attack of heat from all side but especially below, propelling her to her feet as if to face her doom head-on because that was how they did it in all the dramas she’d ever plundered from Earth Archives. . . .

  She stood up and saw Marcsson looking so exceptionally alive, so poised on the leading edge of every sense that she barely recognized him. And then it came to her, the question she should be asking even if it was too late to matter. She suddenly though could all of this — the Dream, the Crash, the thermal arriving just in time to let him observe its effects on his research — could all of this really be Azamat Marcsson’s idea of What To Do With That Chemistry Set We Gave You For Your Birthday, Junior?

  COME OUT OF THE

  HINDBRAIN

  THE BOAT SPUN ON THE RISING EDGE OF the first wave, was lifted by a geyser of shattered luma, and fell away from the well, accelerating rapidly as Marcsson threw all power into the drive. The air blurred and refracted everything with its heat. Marcsson had kept his feet and now accelerated ruthlessly, apparently unafraid to capsize. Steam roared past his body leaving a ghostly outline where he’d been. Kalypso was thrown from one side of the cockpit to the other, found herself with her feet under her, and held on for all she was worth.

  They shot away from the eruption with the colors of the water around them adjusting so swiftly to the temperature change that the thermal manifested as a rapidly spreading stain on the surface of the planet. The System was seeking homeostasis.

  The boat began to draw ahead of the wave.

  Kalypso apprehended that she was still alive. She rocked on her feet, then stumbled toward Marcsson and clutched his arm with a sudden need for human contact. She shivered and sobbed against Marcsson’s impassive bicep, alternately clutching him and pounding him with small fists. The motion of the boat made her sick but she willed this away.

  At length she drew back and looked at him, expecting some sharing of relief; some acknowledgment of what had happened. His profile was cool. She thought of the way he’d spitefully destroyed the probe and drew back from him.

  “What have you done? How could you cut us of from contact with First?”

  “You heard Lassare,” he said, his eyes moving jerkily across the readouts on the dash. “I have sabotaged their AI. I have removed their control. I am in league with the Dead. I must be stopped.”

  Kalypso resumed her position in the bottom of the boat, a little heap of distressed human.

  “The Dead?” she heard herself say. “No. Please.”

  No one ever talked about the Dead if they could help it. Kalypso accepted this without question: it was the way things had always been. Sieng’s research team had made the ultimate sacrifice: in trying to develop useful, Earthlike strains of T’nane life form they had unleashed an infection on themselves. If she were inside First right now, telling ghost stories with her cluster, Kalypso might welcome reference to the Dead, for they possessed a mystique for all the T’nane-born. Out here, though, shit was different.

  Kalypso was becoming agoraphobic. There were no walls here. T’nane’s fluid surface stretched endlessly in all directions. If they were outside radio range, there would be no contact with Oxygen 2, or her cluster, or anyone, as long as Ganesh remained unsafe to interface. This knowledge struck at her physically. It made her very bones hurt with isolation. Now that she was experiencing it, the Wild was much bigger than it had seemed in Dreams. Her stomach felt light and dangerous.

  “You planned this,” she accused, hearing the outrage in her own voice at the idea that Marcsson should have been capable of sabotage. “You crashed Ganesh on purpose. You stole this boat. Why? And what’s in these” — she gestured to the collection fils assembled around the perimeter of the cockpit— “that’s so important?”

  He went on working in silence for a moment, while she weighed the risks of making him crazy again by pressing him. When he spoke, his voice cracked and the words came haltingly, but without the interface, he made some sense.

  “I did not. Crash. Ganesh. On purpose,”

  “Never mind,” Kalypso said quickly, thinking, Uh-oh.

  After a minute he said, “I needed Earth Archives. I didn’t want them to know.”

  “Them? You mean the Mothers?”

  “I needed Sieng’s data.”

  “What were they doing in Earth Archives?”

  “They keep Sieng’s data there.”

  “The Mothers keep Sieng’s data in Earth Archives? Why?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “Why? To master the language. To solve the Oxygen Problem.”

  Oh, dear.

  “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids,” Kalypso said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She knew she sounded sarcastic but couldn’t help it. “Don’t you think, Azamat, that if Sieng and her team and all the Mothers and all the witch doctors and Ganesh can’t solve it, don’t you think that should tell you something? I mean, what’s a nice Grunt like you doing in a place like this?”’

  “I’m just trying to collect my data,” he said obtusely. Kalypso sighed.

  “I know you used my jazz to get access to the locked areas,” she said, “because you left a trail behind you and now everybody thinks I crashed Ganesh. That’s how you got into the Core, isn’t it? You knew there were backdoors.” She snorted. “And you told me you didn’t need audio.”

  “I don’t know how it happened.�
�� His gloved hands moved with a surety that Kalypso couldn’t really conceive of under the circumstances. The sky itself frightened her. “I used your music node for access, that’s true. I asked Ganesh for the Sieng files, and it pulled them through the music. That was the only way I could get them out.”

  She nodded wearily; she should have recognized this before. Ganesh was an evolving system, and Earth Archives were organized according to older paradigms than, for example, those used by the Dreamer. Ganesh wasn’t neatly structured, and to move information from one node to another the AI sometimes had to intra-translate. It must have used sound to encode the Sieng data so as to render it usable within the Dreamer. Which would sort of explain the attack killer blood-vessel harp. Maybe. Because, of course, there was something fishy in the fact that Marcsson claimed Sieng’s research was stored in Earth Archives. What would it be doing there? Kalypso had seen some of Sieng’s data. They were stored adjacent to Alien Life, and there was no need to go through contortions to get to them: Sieng’s luma research was the most-examined of all the studies done on this planet.

  “I didn’t alter the Core on purpose. I can’t explain without sounding silly and irrational.” His brow wrinkled behind the faceplate.

  Kalypso stifled a laugh. He must not remember running around the Gardens naked and berking.

  “Why don’t you take a shot at it anyway?”

  Another long pause. He was clearly struggling for words.

  “Well . . . it’s like something dragged me.”

  “Dragged you. What dragged you? Where? How?”

  He slipped into interface, then took several quick breaths through his mouth, as if trying to slip a word into a heated conversation. “Think nocturnally. Come out of the hindbrain—come out where you can be observed.”

  “Do you . . . um . . . remember what happened when you came out of the Dreamtank?”

  He started and then gave an odd, suspicious half-smile. The interface worked silently. It spooked her out.

  “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re trying to get me to commit to What Is, but I won’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  She knew she should shut up now. She knew this but she said, “Look: what you just did? Destroying the probe? That’s really not a good thing, do you understand that? You have your filaments, right? So can you please take us to Oxygen 2?”

  “I can’t,” he answered. He finished pulling in the filaments and began to carefully coil and store them. The boat had slowed but apparently continued follow some course he had set. “Ganesh needs these things. I must provide them.”

  “Ganesh . . . is a little berky right now,” she ventured. “Maybe you should avoid interfacing from now on. Let me handle that.”

  “For a long time I couldn’t see you, or hear you or apprehend you with any sense. Yet it seems to me now that I suspected your presence all along: or is that just a trick of the Dream? I don’t know if the Dream is over or not. I don’t trust you.”

  Pause.

  “I don’t trust you either,” Kalypso said. She knew he wasn’t talking to her, but it made her feel slightly less bad if she could mock him. His tone was so sincere, so pathetic.

  “I had an argument with a witch doctor about this. Ideas are real, he said. No, I said, that’s a contradiction in terms. The whole point of ideas is that they are not real, for we cannot contact them directly with our senses. Ideas exist only in the mind. So do sensory images, he said. Everything in the mind is indirect, he said. But I was speaking in the Platonic sense in which the Ideal exists in a separate realm from the Material, and anyway even if I hadn’t been, I said, we can get machines to react to the real, but we can’t get them to react to ideas. Yes we can, stupid, he said. That’s what Ganesh does.

  “I know he’s wrong somehow. I mean, it’s true that Ganesh doesn’t distinguish between the abstract and concrete unless you tell it to. But that isn’t what I mean. I don’t know what I mean, and I suspect it’s your fault. Everything I’m thinking, you twist until I can’t recognize it. You play with me.”

  He paused for breath and Kalypso said, “They need you. At Oxygen 2. The witch doctors need you. Ganesh needs you. We have to go there.”

  “That way will be watched,” he answered. “They will hunt me. They hate me.”

  “Who hates you?”

  “The foragers in an ant colony are always the old and weak. The mortality rate outside the nest is so high that only the most expendable members of the colony are risked in the search for food. Not that altruism makes much sense unless you’re a haploid organism.”

  “Azamat. What are you talking about?”

  “The Dead. I’m talking about the Dead. When you died, they died, too. They couldn’t gestate embryos. They were too weak to be Grunts. They served no purpose. And anyway . . . things had happened to them.” Suddenly he spun in a circle, his eyes scanning the boat as if someone had come up behind him and touched him.

  Kalypso said, “Look, there’s nobody here but you and me. I’m trying to understand you. Do you realize what’s happened to First?”

  “I found you,” he said. “I was deep in the Archives and I couldn’t believe it when I saw you there. Do I dare hope? So much wasted, but now there’s a chance. I’ve been wanting so badly to ask you this. Wanting it for years and thinking it could never be but now, now I see maybe a way. Tell me, please, because I’ve never been able to determine why they don’t use hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide: it’s the obvious pathway. When you take a look at their syntropes you keep finding small differences in the tetrahydrofolate intermediates across phenotypes.”

  He stopped and looked at her expectantly.

  “It’s a problem of language. Right? I know, I know. I lack scope, but I’m working on it.” Eagerness animated his features like a wind.

  “That’s good. . . .” Kalypso ran a cautious tongue over her dry lips.

  “I want to believe in you,” he said. “Give me something to hold on to. I want something to trust.” He held her in his eyes and she was afraid. Suddenly his expression flattened again. “Forget it. You think I’m stupid.” He turned back to the filament.

  “No! Wait, please.” Kalypso, for the first time in a long time, had gotten an actual idea. She scrambled to find the resolve to make it work, took a deep breath, said, “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. But you have to take me back to Oxygen 2.”

  He studied her. Kalypso’s poker face was out of practice, and anyway she’d never played cards with Marcsson because he didn’t socialize, so she didn’t know his particular weaknesses. Still, she’d conned Jianni out of more hands than she could count. How hard could it be?

  “I’m going to help you, Azamat. You’re in over your head. You have to trust me.”

  “Will you explain? Will you teach me the language?” She knew by the urgency in his voice that she had him.

  “Yes,” she vowed in her best shotgun-soothing-the-troubled- doze tone. “You must trust in me. It will be all right.”

  He took a long breath.

  “All right,” he repeated. “It will be all right.”

  “But stay out of interface,” she warned. “Do you know the way to Oxygen 2?”

  “It’s not a good idea,” he said. “We will have to pass the clayfields, and you know what that means.”

  She didn’t, but she nodded anyway. “I know. We’ll take our chances. Lay in a course, since you seem to be so good at it.”

  He shrugged, suddenly docile. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  By now, weariness and hunger had all but overcome Kalypso. She was dizzy and slightly sick, and her face throbbed. She rummaged for food and was thankful to find the stores packed for the entire cluster whose boat Marcsson had stolen. She ate ravenously. Mentally she kept turning to her cluster, thinking about each of them in turn and feeling more miserable by the second. What about Tehar? Had he escaped? Why hadn’t he answered her, in the interface? What if what had happe
ned to Jianni happened to Tehar?

  She should be at First. If anyone had a prayer of talking to Ganesh, it was Kalypso. Whereas she couldn’t very well babysit Marcsson when a single swat of his hand could knock her down.

  She took an inventory of their resources and began to prickle with fear. It was worse than she thought. They weren’t producing enough oxygen, and Marcsson had stressed the engine reserves in fleeing the thermal. Gazing into the fog ahead, she didn’t see anything she trusted; and certainly nothing like land. Her eye was drawn into corridors and valleys in the fog; light cast in feathery brushstrokes across the face of things; wavering reflections of cloud on sea and sea on cloud. Sometimes, when the mist parted a certain way she swore that just beyond it she could see the shivering outlines of some city where the doors and windows didn’t all turn inward, where the view led out on high — where she might hope for a moment or more to be still, and quiet, and the surface beneath her wouldn’t move. Ten her fooled eyes would recover and there would be only more mist, and silence.

  “Are you sure you know where we’re going?” The thermal map was still incomprehensible to her. Food had made her sluggish: the need for sleep became oppressive.

  “I know this course,” he said. “I’ve been to the clayfields before. So have you. Many times. It’s a spawning ground.”

  What?

  “Ah . . . yes, of course.”

  “The source of the first bridging complex. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t know. I’m exhausted.” Already she was finding it difficult to play the role she had set for herself.

  This didn’t seem to satisfy him, although he chewed on it for a while.

  “I have to sleep,” she groaned. She made herself run a manual check of the heat seals and dragged the canopy closed to collect oxygen before collapsing at the bottom of the cockpit. Then she slept. But she woke, disoriented, when Marcsson lay down, taking up most of the cockpit. She could hear him breathing in rhythm with the patterns on his interface. She shoved at him but he didn’t budge. His chest felt like rock.